Our responses to cultural input can be strange and complex. We
generally learn at an early age to distinguish real from “pretend”, yet
we relish theatre because sharing the same time and space with
performers makes the experience more “real”. And what about verbatim or
other fact-based theatre? Or fictional drama staged after research into
real-life analogues of characters? And what is it that we get from theatre, anyway?
Entertainment and escape? Confrontation and challenge?

Tim Crouch’s plays consistently investigate how audience, performers
and material interact with one another, and they do so in deceptively
low-key modes of performance. There is no “action” to speak of in The Author...in fact, there’s not even a
stage, just two opposing banks of seating in which, amongst us, sit
four performers including Crouch himself. He plays “Tim Crouch”, the
author of a (fictitious) play in which two of the others (played by Vic
Llewellyn and Esther Smith) performed and the third, an avid
theatregoer (Adrian Howells), had an extreme experience. They speak to
us and only occasionally to each other, sharing their views various
anecdotes and experiences with us. It is, as Crouch’s script says, “an
easy, playful presence.”

Almost imperceptibly at first, references to sexual and violent
enormities creep in, gradually moving into the foreground until we are
repeatedly questioning the proprieties of using such events, such
knowledge, in drama. Do we devalue people’s life traumas by plugging
them into an actor’s characterisation? Do we risk such energies
spilling off the stage? Do we grow desensitised ourselves? How far are
we as spectators prepared to sanction, to authorise, such possibilities? The
repeated questions to us, “Can you see all right?” and “Are you okay if
I carry on?”, draw ever more muted and uneasy responses from us as we
watch, chiefly, ourselves and our own reactions.

This is not audience participation; it is the audience at once being
the theatre and interrogating it. Lighting cues and musical interludes
sometimes manipulate us overtly, on other occasions deliberately abrade
against the mood of the moment. At the end, after the performers have
left the space one by one, and without a curtain-call, we too file out
to the unsettlingly wistful strains of the theme to Midnight Cowboy. Perhaps, just now,
it could be replaced by that of a Polanski film.